Karzai Insists U.S. Forces Killed Civilians in a Raid

KABUL, Afghanistan — For the second time in less than a week, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has picked a high-profile fight with his American allies, in the midst of a grand council that he convened to support a long-term security agreement with the United States.

American officials reacted with anger and exasperation on Saturday after Mr. Karzai publicly accused American Special Forces troops of killing civilians in a raid on an Afghan home; American officials said it was an Afghan-led raid that killed only insurgents.

Moreover, Mr. Karzai’s aides continued to insist that even if the council, or loya jirga, ratified the bilateral security agreement with the United States, Mr. Karzai would not sign it until next year, after a presidential election to choose his successor, but before he leaves office.

The remarks from the president’s camp left many people wondering why Mr. Karzai had convened a loya jirga, bringing to Kabul 2,500 Afghan notables from around the country, dismissing most employees from work for six days and locking down a city of five million so thoroughly that all roads to it were blocked for several days.

Even Mr. Karzai’s allies were at a loss to explain what he hoped to gain from the perplexing series of events around what was expected to be a straightforward deal. Mr. Karzai had earlier asked the Americans to delay signing the security agreement until a new president was elected, possibly allowing him to pass responsibility for the deal to his successor.

Mr. Karzai might also view a delay as a way to wring more concessions from the United States or retain political leverage and avoid being seen as a lame-duck president.

In another long telephone call on Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry warned the Afghan leader that if the agreement was not signed within a month, there would be no agreement to sign.

Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, bluntly said Saturday that Mr. Karzai felt that Mr. Kerry, in a conversation Mr. Faizi described as “tense,” was threatening him. “When the U.S. secretary of state says if there is no agreement there will be no security, we can say there is pressure, there is threats,” Mr. Faizi said.

American officials have insisted that without a deal this year, they would not have time to prepare an American force for its mission after 2014, which the security agreement calls for.

The Afghans dismiss that. “We don’t believe there’s any zero option,” Mr. Faizi said. “We believe if they have waited until now, they can wait five more months.”

“There is no deadline for us,” he added. “We have said that in the past.”

He said Mr. Karzai believed that the Americans could not be trusted to keep their agreement, and even though both sides agreed on the security agreement’s wording, he wanted to wait until after the election next April to test further conditions: whether American forces would stop raids on Afghan homes, help promote peace talks and not interfere in the election.

Western diplomats saw that as effectively reopening talks on the security agreement, despite Mr. Karzai’s public agreement to its terms on Wednesday.

“He’s negotiating in public,” one diplomat said.

“It’s a totally different situation when the president of a country has no trust in the U.S.,” Mr. Faizi said. “That means everything, that’s a totally different way of doing things.”

When Mr. Karzai first brought up the idea of delaying the signing of the accord, in his opening remarks to the jirga on Thursday, American officials hastened to find a reliable translation of what he said. Many who were there could not believe their ears, including the American ambassador and American commander.

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Hamid Karzai spoke at the opening of a council meeting, surprising many listeners when he said he would delay signing a crucial deal.CreditOmar Sobhani/Reuters

The part where he said he did not trust them and they did not trust him was clear enough, but not signing what he had agreed to sign once the jirga approved it: that was puzzling. As the Americans saw it, the delay risked bringing to a crashing and unsatisfactory end an investment of half a trillion dollars and 2,292 American lives, along with 1,105 other coalition deaths.

Only a week earlier, diplomats were calling Mr. Kerry “the Karzai Whisperer,” after he came to Kabul and resolved most of the deadlock over the security agreement in early October.

That term is used only ironically now. In more recent contacts, both the Americans and the Afghans have come away with sharply divergent accounts of what the two men had agreed to. According to one such account, Mr. Kerry said that President Obama would apologize for American conduct during the war, which Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama’s aides denied had ever been discussed.

And Friday night, just after Mr. Karzai and Mr. Kerry ended their conversation, a statement on the Afghan presidency’s website quoted Mr. Karzai as accusing American Special Forces troops of killing two innocent twin brothers, a mason and a plumber, in a raid on an Afghan home in Nangarhar Province last Tuesday, two days before the jirga started.

The American-led coalition insisted that the raid had been led by Afghans, not Americans; that it killed gun-wielding insurgents, not civilian construction workers; and that complaints about the episode, delayed until the jirga was underway, were obviously politically inspired.

“There is no doubt that these are spurious civilian casualty allegations,” said a senior Western official here. “People are fairly mad at Karzai now; there’s a lot of anger and a lot of disdain.”

Throughout the negotiations over the loya jirga, coalition officials had been deliberately silent, but this time they pushed back, at least on the military side.

“Unfortunately, some people are using allegations of civilian casualties for political purposes,” an International Security Assistance Force official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of official policy.

“The statement goes directly to asserting this was a unilateral operation,” the official said, referring to Mr. Karzai’s statement. “It was not. It was Afghan-led with 100 Afghan National Security Force personnel and 17 coalition advisers.” However, an ISAF spokesman, John D. Manley, confirmed that “Afghan National Security Forces and a coalition adviser engaged and killed” the two Afghans.

A United States official here, also speaking on the condition of anonymity as a matter of policy, said: “Misleading statements like this do not help to finalize the bilateral security agreement as soon as possible this year, which is essential to the future of Afghanistan and the confidence of the Afghan people.”

But Afghan officials did not back down. “On this incident, the local people’s and local officials’ accounts differ from the one the U.S. military gives,” Mr. Faizi, the spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said Saturday. He added that American officials had always been quick to deny that victims of such raids were civilians, and that an Afghan investigation by the Nangarhar governor, Mualavi Ataullah Ludin, had confirmed that the victims were civilians.

Mr. Ludin, interviewed by telephone, said that the Nangarhar raid was led by American Special Forces troops, and that the only Afghans present were mercenaries employed by them.

Mr. Faizi added that this raid was another example of why the Afghans no longer trusted the Americans, because it violated an agreement limiting raids on Afghan homes to Afghan-led missions, initiated at Afghan request.

He said Mr. Karzai would use his speech on the final day of the loya jirga, now scheduled for Sunday, to explain his position on delaying the signing.

One delegate to the loya jirga, speaking on the condition of anonymity while the meetings were going on, said that most of the delegates seemed to favor the agreement, and would urge Mr. Karzai to sign it quickly.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.

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